Several modern day infrastructural facilities require delivery of services across a large geographic area covering a town, city or district. Well known examples of such facilities include lighting infrastructure (including lighting of roads and streets), traffic management, and public transport. New requirements are also emerging such as those relating to women's security and general street crime, and air-pollution monitoring. Such facilities are termed “infrastructure facilities”. As the need for such facilities has gained importance various solutions have emerged, however all such suggestions provide stand-alone solutions addressing only a single infrastructure facility. As a consequence, modern day implementations reveal several solutions that coexist separately in proximity with one another.
FIG. 1 shows an existing arrangement of providing infrastructure facilities, for example in a smart city. The mobile communication infrastructure (101) exists separately and independently from the remaining infrastructure facilities such as Video Surveillance (102), Public Transport Vehicle Monitoring (103) and Air Pollution monitoring (104). Common resources are not shared and each facility operates independently and non-synergistically. As a result, advantages that could accrue from interaction are not realized thereby limiting efficacy and lacking efficiency and cost effectiveness.
Infrastructure facilities are driven by the need for communication between field units and central control and monitoring stations that are responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of such facilities across a large geographic area. This common requirement is inherent to every one of the infrastructure facilities and comprises a significant portion of the functional behavior of such facilities. Practical limitations and cost constraints very often necessitate the use of wireless communication for meeting this requirement. Individual field units are therefore equipped with wireless communication capabilities. In the vast majority of cases the wireless communication is in the form of radio communication.
Field units of several of the infrastructure facilities are often situated in proximity to one another. In particular, roads and street poles are convenient and logical locations for the deployment of such devices. As a result, several of the field units from different infrastructure facilities are clustered together in such areas. The wireless radio signals from different systems overlap and are prone to interfere with one another. This situation is aggravated by the fact that the radio spectrum is already crowded and it is difficult to allocate the communication frequencies in a segregated manner.